Tag Archives: Blaxploitation

The unique and wonderful Etrange Festival celebrated its 20th anniversary this year with a spectacular line-up, which, as always, defied categories with the latest offerings from Takashi Miike and Marjane Satrapi, special programmes picked by Godfrey Reggio, Jacques Audiard and Sion Sono, musical events, emerging talent, short films and an exhibition on Fumetti.

Older treasures included Sergei Paradjanov’s sumptuously poetic Sayat Nova, Jerry Schatzberg’s seminal 70s road movie Scarecrow, Jörg Buttgereit’s ingeniously disturbing The Death King and Blaxploitation rarity Dolemite while the Pere Ubu Film Group’s did a live score to Carnival of Souls.

Marjane Satrapi’s dark animated killer tale The Voices won the audience award and we were particularly excited to discover David Robert Mitchell’s fantastical take on American sexual puritanism It Follows, David Wnendt’s uninhibited erotic comedy Wetlands, Nacho Vigalondo’s found footage thriller Open Windows, Austrian Western The Dark Valley, Aleksei German’s last film Hard to Be a God, hallucinatory French nightmare Horsehead and Austrian experimental dance film Perfect Garden.

To mark its anniversary, the programme also included a selection of the best of 20 years of the festival, including Nikos Nikolaidis’s demented noir homage Singapore Sling, Ian Kerkhof’s avant-garde documentary Beyond Ultra Violence: Uneasy Listening by Merzbow, Harmony Korine’s Gummo, Clive Barker’s Lord of Illusions, the short films of the Quay Brothers, Duncan Jones’s Moon, Hungarian oddity Hukkle, Shinya Tsukamoto’s Tetsuo and Ben Wheatley’s Down Terrace.

This blaxploitation classic has it all: sleaze, violence, badasss mamas, nasty drug pushers, mean inner city streets and a funky score by Willie Hutch. But what makes it truly special is the formidable Pam ‘a whole lotta woman’ Grier (who returned as Jackie Brown in Tarantino’s homage to the genre), handing out magnificently spirited ass-whippings to the bad guys in this outré tale of revenge in the ghetto. Exploitation specialist Jack Hill directs, and Foxy’s no-good brother is played by Antonio Vargas, better known as Huggy Bear in Starsky and Hutch.

Guest speaker: Rebecca Johnson, award-winning writer/filmmaker, director of Top Girl, the Brixton-set story of a fearless young girl coming of age in a man’s world.

FILM WRITING COMPETITION:
Film students and aspiring film writers are invited to enter our film writing competition: write a 200-word review of Foxy Brown and send it to ladyvengeance [at] electricsheepmagazine.com, marked ‘Film writing competition’ in the subject line. A film expert to be announced shortly will pick the best entry. Deadline: Thursday 29 July. The selected review will be published on the Electric Sheep website in August. Read the May winning review of Midnight Cowboy.